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A comprehensive and compassionate guide to navigating loss.
When social worker Lisa Keefauver became a widow in 2011, she was alarmed to discover that even though 100 percent of us experience loss, we're living in a grief illiterate world. In her work as a therapist, and in her search for help in the wake of her own loss, Keefauver began to see how the misguided stories we consume about grief lead to unnecessary suffering. Responding to the problematic narratives that grief is something to move on from after completing the five stages like some sort of to-do list, Keefauver became a grief activist. Through this book and her hit podcast of the same title, she creates a safe place to be inside the messiness of it all, to discover the full spectrum of grief, and to find the tools that help grievers move forward, not on. Grief is a Sneaky Bitch is a comprehensive guide--both a manual full of insights and skills and, even more importantly, a thoughtful companion that helps readers feel seen and held.
Keefauver shares her personal and professional wisdom alongside the lessons she's learned from clinicians, authors, poets, and friends. In place of rigid instructions and must-do checklists, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch invites reflection, encourages self-compassion, and explores the therapeutic power of humor with, yes, a bit of profanity.
A stirring defense of Sinéad O'Connor's music and activism, and an indictment of the culture that cancelled her.
In 1990, Sinéad O'Connor's video for Nothing Compares 2 U turned her into a superstar. Two years later, an appearance on Saturday Night Live turned her into a scandal. For many people--including, for years, the author--what they knew of O'Connor stopped there. Allyson McCabe believes it's time to reassess our old judgments about Sinéad O'Connor and to expose the machinery that built her up and knocked her down.Addressing triumph and struggle, sound and story, Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters argues that its subject has been repeatedly manipulated and misunderstood by a culture that is often hostile to women who speak their minds (in O'Connor's case, by shaving her head, championing rappers, and tearing up a picture of the pope on live television). McCabe details O'Connor's childhood abuse, her initial success, and the backlash against her radical politics without shying away from the difficult issues her career raises. She compares O'Connor to Madonna, another superstar who challenged the Catholic Church, and Prince, who wrote her biggest hit and allegedly assaulted her. A journalist herself, McCabe exposes how the media distorts not only how we see O'Connor but how we see ourselves, and she weighs the risks of telling a story that hits close to home.
In an era when popular understanding of mental health has improved and the public eagerly celebrates feminist struggles of the past, it can be easy to forget how O'Connor suffered for being herself. This is the book her admirers and defenders have been waiting for.
A new translation of El Llano en llamas, an iconic collection of short stories that changed the course of Mexican and Latin American literature.
Since its publication in 1953, Juan Rulfo's The Burning Plain (El Llano en llamas) has become Mexico's most significant and most translated collection of short fiction. Set largely in a distressed rural region of the state of Jalisco known as El Llano Grande (the burning plain of the title), the seventeen stories of this anthology trace the lives of characters in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and the Cristero Revolt (1926-1929). A father carries his fatally wounded son through the night in search of healing; a young girl's prized cow is swept away by a flood, along with her family's harvest; and a group of campesinos spend all day walking across the immense, barren Llano that the government has given them to farm. Through it all, Rulfo rejects moralizing and nostalgia, capturing instead the hushed reality of a landscape and people marked by violence and the weight of hardship and injustice.
Rulfo's writing, often compared in importance to that of William Faulkner, Anton Chekov, and Gabriel García Marquez, is characterized by a laconic literary prose and the distinctive language heard throughout the rural communities of southern Jalisco. These qualities come alive in Douglas J. Weatherford's vibrant new rendition of Mexico's most celebrated collection. Seventy years after its first publication in Spanish, Rulfo's work speaks to a new generation of readers.
Among contemporary writers in Mexico today [1959], Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals.―The New York Times Book Review
What is remarkable about these sketches is that the characters are rendered with deep honesty; their faults are highlighted, celebrated in a way that is reminiscent of Chekhov's peasants.―Publishers Weekly
A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren't the center of their stage.
Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists--these and other band people are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry.
In the 1940s Henry J. Kaiser was a household name, as familiar then as Warren Buffett and Donald Trump are now. Like a Horatio Alger hero, Kaiser rose from lower-middle-class origins to become an enormously wealthy entrepreneur, building roads, bridges, dams, and housing. He established giant businesses in cement, aluminum, chemicals, steel, health care, and tourism. During World War II, his companies built cargo planes and Liberty ships. After the war, he manufactured the Kaiser-Frazer automobile. Along the way, he also became a major force in the development of the western United States, including Hawaii.
Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West is the first biography of this remarkable man. Drawing on a wealth of archival material never before utilized, Mark Foster paints an evenhanded portrait of a man of driving ambition and integrity, perhaps the ultimate can-do capitalist. He covers Kaiser's entire life (1882-1967), emphasizing many business ventures. He demonstrates that Kaiser was the prototypical frontier entrepreneur who often used government and union support to tame the wilderness.
Though today the Kaiser industries are no longer under family management, the Kaiser legacy remains great. Kaiser played a major role in building the Hoover, Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and Shasta dams. The Kaiser-Permanente Medical Care Program still provides comprehensive health care for millions of subscribers. Kaiser-planned communities remain in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and Boulder City, Nevada. Kaiser Engineers was actively engaged in hundreds of huge construction jobs across the nation and around the world.
U.S. and business historians, scholars of the modern West, and general readers will all find much to absorb them in this well-written biography.
The essential guide to Texas's state parks and historic sites.
Updated with a new park, Palo Pinto Mountains State Park west of Forth Worth; new historic sites; and scores of beautiful new photographs, the Official Guide to Texas State Parks has all the essential information organized by geographical regions to help you plan your great Texas adventure. The only complete resource of its kind on Texas, Laurence Parent's Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the trusted source, with more than sixty-five thousand copies sold over the past thirty years.
Praise for Previous Editions
Texas state-park fans should be thrilled. . . . Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the ultimate book detailing Texas's state parks.--Dallas Morning News
This book will make you want to hit the road to visit the natural splendor of Texas.--Houston Chronicle
It's good enough for a coffee table or a campfire. The Official Guide to Texas State Parks gives you sleek photography, maps, narratives, and loads of information.--Southern Living
The newly updated Official Guide to Texas State Parks and Historic Sites . . . has beautiful color photographs and insights on camping, fishing, horseback riding, and other recreational opportunities around the state.--Texas Journey
A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.
When Wilco's 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as dad rock, Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad's glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock's emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.
In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe's allusions to queer longing, Radiohead's embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen's very trans desire to change my clothes my hair my face--and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis's own who embody the tenderness at the genre's heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.
A handbook for what to expect the first year of beekeeping and beyond.
The path to becoming a successful beekeeper begins with a deep understanding of the bees themselves. Taking an approach that is both holistic and practical, Tara Chapman, founder and operator of Austin's beloved Two Hives Honey, begins with a primer on honey bee biology and nutrition as well as beehive architecture. (Did you ever wonder why honey combs are composed of tiny hexagons?) A little scientific knowledge goes a long way: a beekeeper who understands how these fascinating creatures work will be better equipped to recognize a particular colony's needs, make sound decisions when the unexpected happens, and adapt their care regimen to changing conditions. Moving beyond the basics, Chapman shows potential beekeepers how to spot pests and diseases; manage swarms (those bees aren't angry; they're just looking for a good home); and, of course, harvest delicious homegrown honey.
Imbued with the joy of the beekeeping journey, For the Bees provides practical visual explanations through appealing illustrations, that, alongside Chapman's own stories from the bee yard, share the charms of these essential insects.
More than 100 powerful images by noted photographer Russell Lee that document the working conditions and lives of coal mining communities in the postwar United States; publication coincides with an exhibition at the National Archives in Washington, DC.
In 1946 the Truman administration made a promise to striking coal miners: as part of a deal to resume work, the government would sponsor a nationwide survey of health and labor conditions in mining camps. One instrumental member of the survey team was photographer Russell Lee. Lee had made his name during the Depression, when, alongside Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, he used his camera to document agrarian life for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Now he trained his lens on miners and their families to show their difficult circumstances despite their essential contributions to the nation's first wave of postwar growth.
American Coal draws from the thousands of photographs that Lee made for the survey--also on view in the US National Archives and Records Administration's exhibition Power & Light--and includes his original, detailed captions as well as an essay by biographer Mary Jane Appel and historian Douglas Brinkley. They place his work in context and illuminate how Lee helped win improved conditions for his subjects through vivid images that captured an array of miners and their communities at work and at play, at church and in school, in moments of joy and struggle, ultimately revealing to their fellow Americans the humanity and resilience of these underrecognized workers.
Honorable Mention -- The International Photography Awards 2024 Book Category
Jury Top 5 Selection -- The International Photography Awards 2024 Book Category
Silver Winner in Zines And Photo Book/Culture-- 2024 International Film Photography Award, Analog Sparks
Long before Americans began to officially commemorate Juneteenth, in the heat of East Texas, saddles were being cinched, buckles shined, and lassoes adjusted for a day on the Black rodeo circuit in honor of the holiday. In the late 1970s, as they had been doing for generations, Black communities across the region held local rodeos for the talented cowboys and cowgirls who were segregated from the mainstream circuit. It was to these vibrant community events that bestselling Texas writer Sarah Bird, then a young photojournalist, found herself drawn.
In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird's lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk. Essays by Bird and sports historian Demetrius Pearson reclaim the crucial role of Black Americans in the Western US and show modern rodeo riders--who still compete on today's circuit--as descendants in a more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys. A gorgeous tribute to the ropers and riders--legends like Willie Thomas, Myrtis Dightman, Rufus Green, Bailey's Prairie Kid, Archie Wycoff, and Calvin Greeley--as well as the secretaries, judges, and pick-up men and even the audience members who were as much family as fans, Juneteenth Rodeo ultimately seeks to put Black cowboys and cowgirls where they have always belonged: in the center of the frame.
A narrative account of the evacuation of the Texians in 1836, which was redeemed by the defeat of the Mexican army and the creation of the Republic of Texas.
Two events in Texas history shine so brightly that they can be almost blinding: the stand at the Alamo and the redemption at San Jacinto, where General Sam Houston's volunteers won the decisive battle of the Texas Revolution. But these milestones came amid a less obviously heroic episode now studiously forgotten--the refugee crisis known as the Runaway Scrape.
Propulsive, lyrical, and richly illustrated, Texian Exodus transports us to the frigid, sodden spring of 1836, when thousands of Texians--Anglo-American settlers--fled eastward for the United States in fear of Antonio López de Santa Anna's advancing Mexican army. Leading Texas historian Stephen L. Hardin draws on the accounts of the Runaways themselves to relate a tale of high stakes and great sorrow. While Houston tried to build a force that could defeat Santa Anna, the evacuees suffered incalculable pain and suffering. Yet dignity and community were not among the losses. If many of the stories are indeed tragic, the experience as a whole was no tragedy; survivors regarded the Runaway Scrape as their finest hour, an ordeal met with cooperation and courage. For Hardin, such qualities still define the Texas character. That it was forged in retreat as well as in battle makes the Runaway Scrape essential Texas history.
An arresting memoir of love and unbending religion, toxicity and disease, and one family's desperate wait for a miracle that never came.
Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a twelve-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling, and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the Bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, it was like throwing gasoline on the Holy Spirit. Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called Miracles on 34th Street.
What they didn't know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. Commonly referred to as forever chemicals, the presence of PFAS in West Texas besieged a landscape already burdened with vanishing water, taking up residence in wells and in the bloodstreams of people who lived there. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.
The first critical biography of iconic musician Alanis Morissette, creator of Jagged Little Pill.
The 1990s hardly saw a bigger hit than Jagged Little Pill. Alanis Morissette's defining album won Grammys, dominated the Billboard charts, and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It left a deep mark on the psyches of countless listeners. Three decades later, Megan Volpert checks in with Morissette, probing her rich and varied post-JLP career and bearing feminist witness to the existential anger that ties her recent work to enduring classics like You Oughta Know, One Hand in My Pocket, and Ironic.
Why Alanis Morissette Matters builds a bridge from Jagged Little Pill to the fascinating life and subtle intellect of its creator, exploring how the artist's philosophical interests and personal journey are reflected in each track. Morissette's struggles with censorship, mental health challenges, and Catholicism; her queer allyship, spiritual skepticism, zealous fandom, and philanthropic passions--all are carefully observed by a critic whose own life was touched by Jagged Little Pill. In the album's wake, Morissette has evolved as an artist and global citizen. With sensitivity and a profound love for the music, Volpert guides readers through the case for Morissette's enduring cultural relevance and creative impact.
The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle the world has known. These wiry, intractable beasts were themselves pioneers in a harsh land, moving elementally with drouth, grass, Arctic blizzards, and burning winds. Their story is the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded.
J. Frank Dobie was a tale spinner who appreciated the proper place of legend and folklore in history. In The Longhorns, he tells of the Spanish conquistadors, who brought their cattle with them; of ranching in the turbulent colonial times; of the cowboy, whose abandon, energy, insolence, and pride epitomized the booming West. He writes of terrifying stampedes, titantic bull fights on the range, ghost steers, and encounters with Indians.
A tireless prospector of the history and legends of the Southwest, Dobie spent most of his life preparing to write this book. He was born in the Texas brush country where the Longhorns made their last stand; he back-trailed them into Mexico; he pursued the vivid lore of Texas cowboys and Mexican vaqueros. No historian or naturalist has ever so related an animal to the land, its people, and its history.
How changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women's reproductive roles and rights.
Some of the most groundbreaking moments in American film and TV comedy have centered on pregnancy, from Lucille Ball's real-life pregnancy on I Love Lucy, to the abortion plot on Maude; Murphy Brown's controversial single motherhood; Arnold Schwarzenegger's pregnancy in Junior; or the third-trimester stand-up special Ali Wong: Baby Cobra.
In the first book-length study of pregnancy in popular comedy, Victoria Sturtevant examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around nonmarital pregnancy in the 1960s and '70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks, infertility, adoption, and abortion from the 1980s to now.
Across this history, popular media have offered polite evasions and sentimentality instead of real candor about the physical and social complexities of pregnancy. But comedy has often led the way in puncturing these clichés, pointing an irreverent and satiric lens at the messy and sometimes absurd work of gestation. Ultimately, Sturtevant argues that comedy can reveal the distortions and lies that treat pregnancy as simple and natural women's work, misrepresentations that rest at the heart of contemporary attacks on reproductive rights in the US.
From Billie Eilish to Cassandra Wilson, Elvis Costello to Pearl Jam, many of the world's most beloved musicians have entertained us on Austin City Limits. And for the past couple of decades, each performance recorded on the ACL stage has inspired a special bonus: an original, eye-catching screen-printed poster, commissioned by the show's producer, Austin PBS, and designed by some of their favorite graphic artists from all over the world.
Screen to Screen celebrates the 50th anniversary of Austin's premier gig, presenting every poster in brilliant full color alongside dazzling ACL concert photography and reminiscences from Neko Case, Leon Bridges, and other luminaries. Exciting, evocative, and always unique, the posters are accompanied by insightful creative discussion from several designers, including Mark Pedini and Diana Sudyka, and the book itself is designed by the award-winning, Austin-based firm Preacher Co. Introduced by long-time ACL producer Terry Lickona and with a foreword from Willie Nelson--whom you might remember from the pilot episode, taped half a century ago--this collection brings a piece of Austin and music history to life in vivid color.
An immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas.
Punk rock is known for its daring subversion, and so is the West Texas city of El Paso. In Chuco Punk, Tara López dives into the rebellious sonic history of the city, drawing on more than seventy interviews with punks, as well as unarchived flyers, photos, and other punk memorabilia. Connecting the scene to El Paso's own history as a borderland, a site of segregation, and a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance, López throws readers into the heat of backyard punx shows, the chaos of riots in derelict mechanic shops, and the thrill of skateboarding on the roofs of local middle schools. She reveals how, in this predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene, women forged their own space, sound, and community. Covering the first roots of Chuco punk in the late 1970s through the early 2000s, López moves beyond the breakout bands to shed light on how the scene influenced not only the contours of sound and El Paso but the entire topography of punk rock.
This true story of the Texas brush range and the first cowboys, as thrilling as any tale of fiction, has become a classic in Western literature. It is the story of the land where cattle by tens of thousands were killed on the prairie and where the Skinning War was fought. It is the story of the Chisholm Trail up to Abilene and the Platte and of establishing a ranch on the free grass of the Texas Panhandle, of roping elk in Colorado, of trailing Billy the Kid in New Mexico, of the grim lands of the Pecos. And it is the story of John Young, old-time vaquero who was trail driver, hog chaser, sheriff, ranger, hunter of Mexican bandits, horse thief killer, prairie fire fighter, ranch manager, and other things--a man who was also something of a dreamer, a man of imagination.
How superhero narratives in the margins of the mainstream tell innovative, feminist stories.
It's no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters and inclusive storytelling, exist on the margins of the mainstream superhero genre. But rather than focusing on these stories as marginalized, Sam Langsdale's work on heroes such as Spider-Woman, America Chavez, and Ironheart locates the margins as a site of innovation and productivity, which have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts.
Employing feminist and intersectional philosophies in an analysis of these comics, Langsdale suggests that feminist superheroes have the potential to contribute to a social imagination that is crucial in working toward a more just world. At a time when US popular culture continues to manifest as a battleground between oppressive and progressive social norms, Searching for Feminist Superheroes demonstrates that a fight for a better world is worthwhile.
This story, set in the Piney Woods country of East Texas, spans most of a century, from shortly after the close of the Civil War to the 1960's. It is the story of Charley White, who was born in the middle of those woods--in a decaying windowless log cabin a few years after his mother and father were freed from slavery. His childhood, lived in almost unbelievable poverty, was followed by financial stability achieved in middle age through years of struggle. And then, in order to obey God's will, he abandoned this secure life, and for forty years he waged a one-man war on poverty and intolerance.
Winner of the Carr P. Collins Award (best nonfiction book) of the Texas Institute of Letters, No Quittin' Sense presents the story of Rev. C. C. Charley White, whose life has inspired thousands of readers since the book was first published in 1969.